Design a product to help people read more.

"Read more" could be a dozen products, so I want to pin who this is for and what success looks like before I design.

So my user is the aspiring-but-stalled reader: they buy books, save articles, mean to read, and don't. I'd narrow to them rather than serve hardcore readers (already well served) or non-readers (who don't want this).

The job to be done: help me turn my intention to read into a sustained habit, in the gaps I actually have.

Before I design anything, I'll decompose where the intention actually dies, so I'm not guessing at features. Reading is a habit funnel, and the intention has to survive every transition: choose a book → start a session → sustain attention through it → come back tomorrow. A stalled reader falls out at exactly one of those transitions, which makes the funnel a mutually-exclusive, collectively-exhaustive map of the problem.

Mapping the real failure modes onto it:

• Choose (commitment of choosing): a book is a ten-hour bet chosen half-blind, so picking feels costly and they stall before starting.
• Start (time and attention): reading competes with phones and streaming and feels like it needs a long block, so the session never begins.
• Sustain / return (momentum): they start, drop it for a week, lose the thread, and never come back. No streak, no nudge, no accountability.

The next move is to decide which transition loses the most readers, because that is where a product actually changes behaviour.

I can't fix all three at once, so I'd rank them by what blocks the habit most:

1. Momentum and accountability is the biggest lever. The habit dies between sessions, not during them. Fix this and the rest matter less.
2. Fitting into small time pockets is second. If reading only works in hour-long blocks, it won't survive a normal day.
3. Lowering the commitment of choosing is third. Useful, but people who already buy books have chosen; they just don't continue.

So I'd design primarily around momentum, with time-pocket fit close behind.

Concepts that attack momentum and time-fit:

• A daily reading streak with tiny, achievable goals (ten minutes or ten pages), with reminders timed to the user's dead pockets: commute, before bed. Habit mechanics that work elsewhere, pointed at books.
• Pick up exactly where you left off, with a one-line recap of what happened last, so a week's gap doesn't kill the book. This directly fixes the lose-the-thread death.
• Light accountability: a friend, a small group, or a public commitment, since accountability sustains habits better than willpower.
• Flexible format: let a session be text or audio for the same book, so a commute counts as reading. Meet people where their minutes actually are.

For a first version I'd ship the smallest thing that tests the core bet, that momentum mechanics make stalled readers read more:

In the MVP: import or pick a book, a daily goal, a streak, smart reminders, and the where-you-left-off recap. That's the habit loop, end to end.

What I'd cut for v1: light accountability (powerful, but heavy to build and it needs social density to work) and audio/text switching (a real content and licensing lift). Both are fast-follows if the core loop retains.

I'd cut them not because they're bad, but because the one thing I must learn first is whether the streak-and-recap loop changes behaviour. Adding social before I know that just muddies the read.

I'd measure whether we're building a habit, not just installs:

• Leading indicators (days): the share of users who set a goal and read on day 1, and 7-day streak rate. Early signal the loop is catching.
• Lagging headline (the real outcome): books finished per user per quarter, and weeks active reading. That is "reading more" made measurable.
• Guardrails: we're not driving shallow streak-gaming (opening the app for ten seconds to keep a streak), and reminders aren't tipping into nagging and uninstalls.

Pressure-testing the bet:

Streaks can become the goal instead of reading. People might protect a streak without actually reading. So I'd define the goal as engaged reading time, not app-opens, and watch for shallow sessions.

Reminders can backfire. Habit nudges are a thin line from nagging; if they drive uninstalls, the cure is worse than the disease. I'd cap frequency and let users set their own pockets.

The premise itself could be wrong. Maybe stalled readers don't want to read more, they want to feel like readers. If finished-books doesn't move even when streaks do, that's my signal the product is serving the wrong need, and I'd rethink rather than scale.

So: I'd design for the aspiring-but-stalled reader, target the habit-killing gap between sessions first, ship a tight loop of daily goals, streaks, smart reminders and a where-you-left-off recap, measure finished books and active weeks with guardrails against streak-gaming, and treat social and audio as fast-follows once the core loop proves it changes behaviour.